SOURCE: “A White Man in Love: A Study of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Jack Kerouac's Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneans, and Tristessa,” in College Literature, Vol. 27, No. 1, winter, 2000, pp. 39-62.

In the following essay, Grace analyzes the significance of race in Kerouac's stories about romantic relationships.

Jack Kerouac is generally not thought of as a writer of love stories, his name more readily evoking images of jazz, poetry, Buddhism, the boy gang, and cars zooming along the omnipresent road. But a considerable portion of his Duluoz legend is devoted to representations of women he loved. Maggie Cassidy, written in 1953, introduced the portrait of Mary Carney, an Irish girl who was his high school sweetheart. Later that same year he used The Subterraneans to record his brief but intense relationship with Alene Lee, an African-American woman whom he renamed Mardou Fox for purposes of publication. In 1955-56, he wrote...